Cycling

The people behind Pedal on Parliament have just realised a new video, Katie rides to School, shows how if we were to make the roads safer everyone benefits. So please watch the video, join us on 25th April 2015 to Pedal on Parliament and share the message. We will all be better off when Katie rides to School!

Katie cycles to school. Katie loves cycling to school. Some of her friends do it too.

Katie’s mum bought a bike, too, to take Katie’s brother to nursery. Katie’s mum was surprised it was actually quicker on the bike. Now, when she doesn’t have to go to work, she has time to stop into town and meet her friends. On her way home, she pops into the shops.

Katie’s dad was told by his doctor to lose some weight, so he cycles too.

And at the weekend, they all go out together.

Katie cycles to school though she can only do it because her town built a cycle path very close to the school. Before that, she would have to ride in the road or on the pavement. It was just easier to go in the car.

Katie’s mum can only cycle into town because traffic is gone from the high street. Before, it was clogged with cars. It was just easier to go to the supermarket.

Katie’s dad only started cycling to work because they built a cycle track on the road on his office. Whatever the doctor said, he didn’t like having to deal with all the traffic before. He just wanted to get back safely to his family.

We believe making it safe for Katie and her friends to cycle to school, Katie’s mum to cycle to the shops, and Katie’s dad to cycle to work makes it better for everyone. Including people who don’t even cycle, like shopkeepers, pedestrians, and even other car drivers.

So that’s why we pedalled on parliament – If more kids like Katie are to cycle to school, we need safe space for cycling. If more people are to shop in the local town centre, we need roads where cars don’t dominate. If more people were to cycle to work, we need roads designed with cycling in mind.

This takes investment, but it is investment will pay back tenfold. If we do this then Scotland’s people will be healthier, our towns will be wealthier, our roads will quieter, our air will be cleaner, and our children will do better in school.But, more importantly, we will all be happier.

For 6,000 years the street was a place where people met and talked, they traded and did business, above all they could walk where they liked. The street was a democratic space which belonged to no one group or form of transport. This all ended in the 20th Century with the arrival of the motorists who demanded that they had a greater “right” to use the road than anyone else. Pedestrians were forced to the sides and restricted in where they could cross, cyclists were barely tolerated and expected to keep out of the way. How did all this come about?

When the car first arrived, they were few in number and tightly controlled as it was recognised that motor vehicles were a danger to all. However, as the people who owned cars were wealthy and powerful these measures were soon being watered down. First off, the 1865 “Red Flag Act” was replaced by the Highways Act 1896 which set a limit of speed limit to 14mph (23km/h). This change is still commemorated each year by the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. Then in turn this speed limit was replaced by the Motor Car Act 1903, which raised the limit again, this time to 20mph (32km/h), which is where the speed limit in built up areas should have stayed.

However, after a great deal of pressure from the motoring lobby, all speed limits for cars and motorbikes were removed by the Road Traffic Act 1930. It is very telling that Lord Buckmaster’s opinion at the time was that the speed limit was removed because “the existing speed limit was so universally disobeyed that its maintenance brought the law into contempt”. It is also worth noting that the AA was founded in 1905 to help motorists avoid police speed traps, and the RAC also has a long history of lobbying against speed restrictions.

At this time there were relatively few cars on the roads but the death rate was considerable. Data on road deaths in Great Britain were first collected in 1926, in that year there were 4,886 recorded deaths. The result of the removal of all speed limits for cars meant that in 1931 the death rate hit a new high of 7,343 deaths and 231,603 serious injuries. As a consequence, the new Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, described it as “mass murder” and reintroduced a speed limit for cars at 30 mph in built-up areas (defined in Scotland as areas where the lighting columns are spaced at 185m or less).

But is 30mph an appropriate speed for motor vehicles in a built up area? Well no, as this infographic from Pedal on Parliament [http://pedalonparliament.org] clearly shows:

As speed increases so the survivability of a collision declines. Why would this be?

It’s a simple matter of physics, if streets have large amounts of kinetic (movement) energy moving along them they are more hazardous places to be. Kinetic energy can be shown by the equation Ek = 1/2mv2, where Ek is the amount of kinetic energy (usually given in Joules), m is mass or weight of the vehicle (usually given in Kg), and v2 is velocity or speed which is squared (usually given in meters per second). But what does this mean in reality? Let’s look at the kinetic energy of a small car, these weigh about one tonne (1,000Kg) travelling at 20mph (8.9m/s), so Ek = 0.5 x 1,000 x 8.92 = 39,969J (39.97kJ).

This also tells us that as speed increases, because velocity is squared, the amount of energy increases exponentially. If the vehicle speed doubles, then its kinetic energy quadruples, so at 40mph a one tonne car will now have a kinetic energy of 159.88 kJ. It also tells us that heavier cars are more lethal than lighter ones, so a big 4×4 which can weigh about three tonnes, will have a kinetic energy of 119.91kJ at 20mph and 479.63kJ at 40mph. Just to put all this into context, the kinetic/muzzle energy of a 12 bore shotgun is 4.45kJ. OK so there are some differences is the area over which the kinetic energy would be transferred, but it shows just how lethal cars can be.

Before I move on, just a quick note on the data source for the infographic above. When Donald was drawing it up, we at PoP had a discussion about which paper to take the data from and why. There are a couple of newer papers which appear to give higher survival rates at 30 mph. However, when you read the original source material, you find that the most vulnerable groups, children under 15 years and adults over 70 years, have been excluded from the analysis. No reason is given for this exclusion of data and the reader is left to draw their own conclusions, so we chose to use Aston & McKay 1979. We have received a certain amount of criticism for using “old” data, but as I have shown above, the laws of physics haven’t changed. People say that cars have changed, and yes they have, they have gotten bigger and heavier. A small car in 1979 would have weighed 500-750Kg, now 1,000 Kg, and there were very few 4×4 SUVs. The levels of kinetic energy on our roads for the same speeds are greater than they were before.

Of course the level of kinetic energy is not the only factor that makes lower speed limits safer in built up areas. There are other things to think about too, such as stopping distances, here again the same laws of physics come into play. There is the relationship between driving speed and braking distance. The kinetic energy of a vehicle is proportional to the square of its increased speed, this means that as the driving speed is doubled the braking distance quadruples. Of course there will be those who say the brakes on modern vehicles are better than they used to be. But they are not (as some drivers imagine them to be) magic, they can not overcome the laws of physics. Anti-lock brakes do not significantly reduce braking distance on a dry road, they merely reduce the risk of skidding out of control. Of course braking distance is only one component of Stopping Distance, the other part is thinking distance.

The speed with which the human brain can think hasn’t changed in well over 3 million years, no matter how much some people might want to think otherwise. (Insert your own joke here about Neanderthal taxi drivers). For an alert driver the average time between seeing a hazard and applying the brakes is 1.5 seconds. This means that at 20mph (32Km/h) the driver travels 13m while still thinking, this compares with 20m at 30mph (48Km/h) and 27m at 40mph (64Km/h). Remember this is for an alert driver, increasingly drivers are increasingly distracted by things like mobile phones and satnav systems. This can be the difference between life and death for a pedestrian or a cyclist using the same road.

As speed rises so the amount of time the driver has available to look around for hazards reduces and so does their peripheral vision.

In a busy environment there is a need for the driver to be more aware of what is going on around them. In less busy environments, i.e. motorways where the traffic is all moving in the same direction and there are fewer hazards coming from the sides, allowing the driver to focus more on what is happening in the distance. This is why motorways are generally considered to be safer than urban roads, even though motorways have higher speeds. As any trained advanced driver can tell you, driving at any speed requires constant attention and observation.

Aside from the clear safety benefits of 20mph speed limits for all road users, there are also other benefits to keeping the speed of motor vehicles below 20mph in built up areas. These include reductions in air pollution and noise pollution, both of which have an impact of human health.

There is increasing evidence that air pollution is shortening all our lives. Reducing motor vehicle speeds reduces levels of air pollution at source, so this has to be a good thing. There are some who claim that there are modelling studies suggesting that 20mph speed limits would increase pollution levels. However, there are no measurement studies I can find that bear this out. Models are only as good as the data and assumptions on which they are based, if they can’t be validated by real world data, they are worthless.

By reducing speeds by 10mph, traffic noise is reduced by about 3dB (depending on road surface). High levels of traffic noise cause stress and discourage active travel – who wants to walk along a noisy urban street? This not only bad for the health of people living in urban areas (and the majority of people do now live in urban areas), it is also bad for the local economy as it makes local shopping less attractive. “High street” businesses rely on footfall, not drive past. A study in the UK showed that people who walked to town centres spent an average of £91 per week on shopping, while motorists would spent £64 per week. Edinburgh’s bold move to bring in an almost blanket 20mph speed limit (excluding major roads), will help to make the whole city more vibrant.

The introduction of the 20mph speed limit in Edinburgh has been a long process, first we had the Southside trial. Then there was a two year consultation which showed there is significant support for 20mph speed limits. There was also cross-party support within the council with only the Tories objecting (and one of them called for more roads at 20mph in his ward, after he had voted against the city wide limit). The local chip wrapper did try to play up the “mass protest march” against 20mph, however this turned out to be 47 people organised by a taxi business. The police didn’t need to estimate the numbers which the organiser would then claim to be double. They just did a head count, as did an independent observer who said there were only 43.

Despite this evidence the politicians keep saying that reducing the national speed limit in built up areas to 20mph is unpopular with the electorate, so the question is, is 20mph so unpopular? In a recent poll commissioned by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, found that 58% of Britons “support reducing the national speed limit in built up areas to 20mph to attempt to reduce deaths from road traffic accidents”. The RCPCH recommend that we should: “Encourage physical activity for all children and young people – with and without disabilities – by creating more cycle lanes and promoting 20mph speed limits” and “Reduce the national speed limit in built up areas to 20mph to reduce the number of deaths by road traffic accidents”.

Edinburgh has now committed to doing something which Graz in Austria managed to do 23 years ago. Now if we could just get just Edinburgh to pick up a few other ideas from cities across Europe, maybe Zurich’s policy of one car out, one car in? But then that would need the City of Edinburgh Council to have the ambition to make Edinburgh a world class city.

Some eight years ago when this blog was very new, I wrote a post called On cycle commuting, as it was “coming up to that time of year when people make resolutions to change their lives”. I think it is time to revisit that post. I hadn’t at that time seen just how much selling my car to fund my first year at university and getting a bicycle was going to change my life (OK, so the money only lasted the first term, but I did have a very good time).

That was how I came to sell my last car in 1994 and since then I have never looked back. The car was an MG Midget 1500 since you ask, and I had had two MKIII Midgets (one of which had round rear wheel arches, such a pretty wee car) before that, but despite the 1500’s ugly rubber bumper this one was my favourite, it was such fun. But I digress, at the time I sold the car I couldn’t imagine living without a car and thought that as soon as I graduated I would get myself another one. However, that was not the way things worked out, by the end of four years of car free living I had discovered freedom in the shape of a bicycle and my own two feet, and so I didn’t want to go back to owning a money pit. You never really realise just what a burden a car is until you get rid of it, it is a continual drain on resources. So people think of the car as freedom, but then constantly complain about congestion, the cost of fuel (even when it is getting cheaper), the lack of parking, the cost of insurance, etc. Drivers are never really happy.

When I was living in Aberdeen (2002-2005), I did for a short while consider buying another car. Aberdeen is an awful place to live as it is so car sick, it is difficult to get about by active travel even though it is a small city and distances are short. At the same time it is heavily congested, people drive everywhere, and as a result it can take over half an hour to make a two mile journey. Yes it would be quicker to walk, but there are continuous barriers put up to make walking unpleasant and dangerous, which further increases the incentive to drive. However, I discovered that even in Aberdeen I could get about by bike, although it was more stressful than anywhere else I have ever cycled. Have you tried cycling on roads used by Humvees? In a city where Range Rovers are two a penny, there are some drivers who feel vulnerable unless they are driving a light armoured car imported from a dubious source in the Middle East.

So while I did feel peer pressure to buy a car, especially for getting out of Aberdeen into glorious Aberdeenshire, the thing that ultimately stopped me was sitting down with a piece of paper and working out the economics of doing so. It didn’t take me long to work out that for what it would cost me to buy and run a well maintained five year old second hand car, I could hire a car for three week long rentals and several more weekends (which was as much usage as I could see myself needing at the time). Not only that, but by hiring I would always have the use of a brand new car, I could choose the right size for the journey I was making and if by any chance it did breakdown, I could just hand it back and get another one. Why buy, it really made no sense. After moving back to Edinburgh I did consider joining the City Car Club, but again found that it didn’t suit my needs, in Edinbugh I didn’t feel the need for so many weekend hires and the CCC is more expensive for longer hires, CCC cars are intended to be hired for a few hours at a time. In the last few years I haven’t even felt the need to hire a car at all, as I have discovered that car free holidays are really great fun.

Looking back at my blog post On cycle commuting I realise that it was only the tenth post I had written and the first on the subject of cycling. When I first started this blog I had no idea what I was going to write about, it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that cycling was a subject I was actually interested in. For me the bicycle was just a quick and convenient way of getting from A to B, it was transport, a utility item and nothing more. However, around the same time I found myself commenting on a cycling forum. I don’t quite remember how it happened, I think I was looking something up on the internet and found myself in the commuting section of the old C plus forum (now part of Bike Radar). For some reason I felt the need to join in the conversation, it was the first time that I had joined an internet forum. When the C plus forum was subsumed into Bike Radar, I, like many others, moved to a tiny new forum, run as a hobby by a guy called Shaun. This forum started to see exponential growth and in some ways being there at the start of the growth felt like being a pioneer. I became a regular poster and was involved in a few innovations which helped it to grow as a community.

I found that I made a number of friends through CycleChat, people I have broken bread (or should that be cake) with in the real world, not just on-line ‘friends’. However, over time I drifted away from forums and onto Twitter, here I was involved in a wider range of conversations. Around the same time I also became a qualified cycle trainer and for a while taught kids to ride bikes on the road. This, along with my experiences as a fully qualified driving instructor (before going to Uni as a mature student), changed my views on the safety of our roads. The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain formed around the same time (pretty much by accident). It looked like a good idea so I signed up to it, but as all the meetings were in London, a group of us started to talk about forming a Scottish Consulate, mostly over Twitter, but there was one memorable lunch as well, in our kitchen. Then one evening (24 Feb 2012, for the record) a couple of friends and I were discussing talk of a big protest in London. To quote an e-mail sent the same evening from Dave Brennan to Sally Hinchcliffe and myself:

Hi Guys,

The call has gone out […] for cyclists to go to London on the 28th April
in a show of support for the ‘cycle revolution’. I’d love to go, but I
just can’t make it. Too far, too expensive, too difficult.

However, that got me thinking, surely this is the right time to push the
agenda north of the border. We have a separate parliament who have yet
to make any major noises about this campaign. So, I’m wondering if we
need a Scottish ride to coincide with the London ride. Probably an
Edinburgh ride to Holyrood.

What do you guys think?

So was born Pedal on Parliament. When we started, we had no idea just how big that would become. At one stage in the early planning we were filling out a form to get permission for the ride to go ahead, one question was about how many people did we expect? I suggested that we put down 300 and that if 50 turned up, we’d be doing well. On the 28th April 2012, 3,000 people turn out to ride to Holyrood in support of the PoP Manifesto. Following this first PoP protest ride, we were invited to meet the (then) Minister for Transport, Keith Brown MSP. Since then PoP has had a number of meetings with the Minister and we have made it clear that we are not going away until Scotland becomes a a cycle-friendly nation. It will, one day.

Having seen the turnout for the first Pedal on Parliament, I came up with another idea and innocently put up a blog post asking if there should be an Edinburgh Festival of Cycling? It seemed like a good idea at the time, I hadn’t really expected people to take it too literally, but they did and the next thing I knew, we were doing it. The first Edinburgh Festival of Cycling which was held between 15th and 23rd June 2013, the festival took place again this year (2014) and we are now planning 2015.

So if you are thinking about doing something in the new year to change your life, I would recommend, in the words of Mark Twain, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”

Spokes the Lothian Cycle Campaign group is always on the look out for opportunities to increase the funding of everyday cycling in Scotland. So when they spotted that the Scottish Government is about to receive a £213m boost as a result of the UK Chancellor’s Autumn Budget Statement (thanks to the so-called “Barnett consequentials”). Finance Secretary John Swinney MSP has said £125m of it will go to the NHS, but the remainder is not yet allocated. As the Scottish government will decide very soon, possibly in the next few days or certainly the next few weeks, how to use this money. They suggested that people should write to their MSP’s to suggest that some of this money should be used to invest in cycling infrastructure.

Repeated studies have shown that increasing rates of Active Travel, walking and cycling, for short journeys (and the majority of every day journeys are under 5 miles), have a positive impact on the health and well being of the population as a whole. Not only is Active Travel good for health, it is good for the economy too. Not only does it provide jobs directly, but also people who arrive at work via active means are more productive and take less sick leave. Infrastructure improvements to encourage Active Travel are also cheap and quick to implement, but they do need to be properly funded to achieve their full potential.

In his speech on 9th October 2014 the Finance Secretary, John Swinney, made a promise that the Scottish Government would spend “an additional
£10 million next year for cycling and walking infrastructure”. However, it has subsequently emerged that £5m had in fact been pre-announced in June and that the other £5m is not actually for is not even for walking and cycling. It is for car sharing, bus ticketing incentives, bus shelters and so on, not directly on Active Travel. Therefore unless Mr Swinney is able to find the additional money from somewhere else his promise to Parliament will have been bogus.

The UK government has recently announced £214m additional cycling investment in England. At the same time the Scottish Government will receive £123m in Barnet consequentials, this gives Mr Swinney the opportunity to make good on his promise to Parliament made on the 9th October 2014. Please urge Mr Swinney to take this opportunity to make good on his promise.

Thank you very much for your message. I agree with you about the importance of cycling – it should be encouraged wherever possible. I also agree that misleading announcements by the SNP, of which there are many, should be called out.

I will continue to advocate cycle-friendly policies in Parliament and in this your points are most welcome. Furthermore, I will be questioning the Scottish Government in Parliament today, when I will ask if they have any plans to increase investment in cycling infrastructure.

Thank you for your e-mail about funding for cycling infrastructure. The Scottish Government has recently announced its draft budget for 2015/16 which gives an indication on its intentions for cycling and active travel. I believe that making active travel options more accessible for everyone could help address the physical and mental health problems we face in Scotland. My party, Scottish Labour supports active travel and the encouragement of walking and cycling, as well as more generally the culture of active travel.

We are pleased that in the draft budget for 2015/16, the total budget for sustainable and active travel has increased by over 40% in real terms. We welcome this commitment. However, at this stage we don’t know the details of what this money will be spent on. We are pushing the SNP Government to confirm how this money will be allocated and, in particular, how much of it will be allocated to cycling infrastructure.

Under the transport portfolio, £25m is earmarked for support for sustainable and active travel while local government will be provided with £8m grant funding for cycling walking and safer routes. In its submission to the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee, Spokes also identified funding for active travel within the Future Transport Fund, Forth Bridge construction and trunk road budget lines. Based on Spokes’ estimates, the total funding specifically targeted at active travel in 2015/16 will be £37m, around £28m of which will be spent on infrastructure. This compares with Spokes estimates of £40.3m (total) and £36m (infrastructure) in 2014/15. That’s a big drop in investment.

I want to see increased, sustained year on year investment in infrastructure to encourage cycling so I welcome Edinburgh’s leadership with the council’s commitment to ensure continual, increasing investment in cycling. In 2012/13, 5% of the total transport budget went on cycling investment. In 2014/15, that had increased to 7%.

The Scottish Government needs to put in place proper funding and sustained investment. We need both dedicated facilities for cycling and better integration across our trunk and local road networks. Part of this process must be to ensure that the needs of cyclists are designed into our roads maintenance, our local transport strategies and our planning decisions so that routes and dedicated infrastructure such as parking facilities are designed with the needs of cyclists in mind.

In my campaign to be Scottish Labour Leader I published 100 Ideas for a New Scotland and suggested that we should also be looking at more segregated cycle routes.

Alongside considering cycling as a mode of transport, there are interesting opportunities to take a broader approach. I’m keen that the debate considers how cycling can help to address other Scottish Government goals such as physical activity targets and legacy initiatives attached to the 2014 Commonwealth Games as opportunities to set clear targets on cycling participation. Promoting cycling amongst school students is also crucial.

We need to promote safer road cycling opportunities generally as well as targeting specific cycle interest developments for sport and tourism.

We need a step change to deliver the increases in cycle participation that the Scottish Government want to achieve under the Cycling Action Plan for Scotland and I, along with my Labour Party colleagues will continue to press for investment in facilities and initiatives to make this a reality.

You may be aware that there is a Government debate this afternoon on Active Travel. I have lodged an amendment to the Government motion (copy below) and I am pleased that it has been selected for debate. I will be taking part in this afternoon’s debate, so you will be able to read my contribution in the Official Report, or watch the debate live on the Parliament website.

*S4M-11980.2 Alison Johnstone: Active Travel—As an amendment to motion S4M-11980 in the name of Derek Mackay (Active Travel), insert at end “; reaffirms the Scottish Government’s target of 10% of journeys to be made by bike by 2020; notes the estimate by Spokes that active travel funding in the 2015-16 draft budget is lower than in the previous year; calls on the Scottish Government to reverse this cut and substantially increase funding for active travel; notes the ongoing debate and research into the introduction of presumed liability in relation to road accidents, and urges local authorities to meet growing demand for high-quality walking and cycling infrastructure, extend 20mph speed limits in built-up areas and provide walking and cycling training opportunities to every child in Scotland”.

I have received emails from a number of constituents who share your concerns. My colleague Patrick Harvie MSP is meeting the Finance Secretary tomorrow to discuss the budget and he will be taking the opportunity to press him on active travel funding.

Please do not hesitate to contact me again if I can be of further assistance.

It was the quote of the day, but then Seb is only three and so is entitled to a logic all of his own. Ulli and I were out for a wee ride with an old Uni friend of mine and her son. It might have been the end of November, but it was a glorious day for seeing East Lothian by bike. Suzanne and Sebastian met us at the station in Dunbar. The plan was to ride from Dunbar to North Berwick along the new John Muir Way cycle route, allowing Sebastian to ride his balance bike whenever it was safe to do so, well that was the plan.

Exiting the station, the first issue arose: trying to explain to Sebastian why it wasn’t safe for a three year old to ride from the station out to the edge of town. He wasn’t entirely happy about this, and who can blame him, he had been told he was going out for a ride and now he was told it wasn’t safe. “But why isn’t it safe?” he kept asking. Good question Seb, mainly because a few selfish adults in cars think that they are far more important than children (or even adults) on bikes and they drive badly. However, this is rather a difficult concept to get across to a three year old, and it took a little time for him to reluctantly accept that he would have to travel, at least part of the way, in bike trailer.

Getting out of town proved to be a fraught experience with numpty drivers trying to overtake on blind bends and in other inappropriate places. As a former fully qualified driving instructor I am shocked by the poor standard of driving I see on the roads. Certainly there were a few who could do with taking some driving lessons and learning how to overtake safely.

By the time we time we had gotten to the end of the motor traffic free bit it was time for Sebastian to go back into the trailer. Fortunately by this time he was tired enough not to object and was happy to climb back into the trailer and take a nap while mum did all the work. This was fortunate as the route took us onto (what is euphemistically called) a shared use path. Now as regularly readers of this blog will know, Ulli and I have travelled a fair bit on the continent of Europe, and nowhere have we ever come across a path so narrow that it could only take a cycle trailer being called a shared use path. But this is family friendly East Lothian, where things are different.

VisitScotland has recently woken up to the concept of cycle tourism, but sadly Scottish transport planners haven’t (yet). If Scotland is ever going to achieve its potential as a family friendly tourist destination, it is going to have to do a lot better than this.

Crossing minor roads was also the sort of experience that you wouldn’t come across on the mainland either…

Not far from this crossing, we came across a field of Scottish road engineers and transport planners…

Need I say more?

About this time Seb woke up, hungry, and informed us that he would like to have a ham sandwich. It soon became apparent that wee Sebastian is a follower of the Zoroastrian tradition whereby the repeated chanting can will an object into existence. He is obviously an advanced three year old, or maybe just a three year old. Either way, turning off to find a farm shop where we could source some bread and ham was a relief, especially to Suzanne. Near the farm shop there were an number of happy chickens happy wandering about a field (blissfully unaware of what was sold in the shop). On seeing them, Seb gave a perfect impersonation of a chicken. A short way further do the farm track we passed a field with horses in it, at which point Suzanne asked Sebastian what horses say, he replied “Hello”, bless.

The road past the farm was delightfully free of motor traffic, which might have had something to do with the river crossing half way along.

Fortunately there was a footbridge to allow crossing, it was narrow (only just enough space for the trailer) and slippery, but it was the easier way to get across the river.

By now we were all getting hungry and it had, due to the poor infrastructure, taken far longer than we had expected to get as far as we had. We decided there was no way we would make North Berwick for lunch and so decided that the Tearoom at Smeaton Nursery (on the edge of East Linton) was a more realistic goal. Access to Smeaton Nursery was very muddy, but going in via the delivery entrance (being a Sunday) was mercifully traffic free.

Suitably fed, we decided that, as the day light was getting short, we should head back to Dunbar, but by a more direct rate route along the NCN 76 rather than the John Muir Way. However, this wasn’t without issue either. Trying to access one of the traffic free sections, we found that the western most set of bollards had been set too close together to get the trailer through, and Suzanne was forced to squeeze round the outside.

At the second set of bollards at the eastern end, the trailer was able to pass with about 5 cm to spare, likely not by design but by chance, as no thought had been given to the users in the planning process. The lack of professional competence of British road engineers and transport planners is something which needs to be addressed with some urgency. It is not that they can’t do it, it is more that they lack the training in planning for Active Travel and don’t think about it. The “profession” is totally fixated on motor vehicles and seemingly incapable of understanding the need of non-motorised traffic (for the origins of the word traffic). Earlier this year I tried to set up a CPD workshop for road engineers and transport planners, bringing in a Dutch/Danish consortium to do the training. I was shocked to find that the Professional Officers felt that they didn’t need such training, as they already knew everything they needed to know about providing for active travel.

Overall, I really enjoyed the day out, it is good to get out on the bike with friends. But was saddened by the lack of provision to make this easy for families. It doesn’t have to be this way, as I have seen on my travels on the mainland of Europe, where people expect and enjoy a better quality of life. Why should families be expected to accept second best? Why are we in Scotland not looking to take full advantage of the economic benefit of Active Travel? OK, VisitScotland are just starting to wake up to the fact that cycle tourism in Europe is worth in excess of €44,000,000,000 a year (the overall economic benefits of cycling are at least €205,000,000,000 p.a.), and Scotland is missing out on most of that. In fact our car dependent culture is costing us billions of pounds per year and has a highly negative impact not just on our quality of life, but our longevity, too.